xt7x3f4kqj01 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7x3f4kqj01/data/mets.xml University of Kentucky. Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies Kentucky University of Kentucky. Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies 2000 volumes. Call Number: LD2762.9 .K38c. Accession Number: 2018ua049 journals LD2762.9 .K38c English Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection University of Kentucky Odyssey Magazine Research -- Kentucky -- Periodicals Education -- Research -- Periodicals Research -- Kentucky Odyssey: The Magazine of University of Kentucky Research and Graduate Studies, Fall 2001 text images Odyssey: The Magazine of University of Kentucky Research and Graduate Studies, Fall 2001 2000 2000 2026 true xt7x3f4kqj01 section xt7x3f4kqj01 THE MAGAZINE OF UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY RESEARCH ' FALL 2001

ODYSSEY

MTHETAVERSE

PROJECTING US INTO THE FUTURE

Ice T. Todd Jr., President

Jim Boling, ActingVice President
for Research - Joseph L. Fink 11],
Associate Vice President for
Research - Delwood C. Collins.
Associate Vice President

for Research—Medical Center

Agriculture

AI. Scott Smith [)ean

Nancy (on. Associate Dean for Research
Allied Health

'I'hontas C. Robiiwm. Dean

\ incent Gallicchio. Associate Dean
for Research

Architecture

l)’.l\'l(l Mohne\. Dean

(Ilyde Carpenter. Associate Dean

for Research

Arts and Sciences

Howard (irotch. Dean

1>a\'id l.eep. Associate Dean for Research
Business and Economics

Richard \V‘, Eurs‘t. Dean

Michael 'l‘earney. Associate Dean

for Research

Communications and Information
Studies

,l Davidjohnson. Dean

lack Baseheart. Acting Associate Dean
for Research

Dentistry

Leon A Assael. Dean

,lellrey Ebersole, Associate Dean

for Research

Education

Ed Sagan. Acting Dean

Robert Shapiro. Associate Dealt

tor Research

Engineering

Thomas \V' Lester. Dean

Alan ’1‘. Male. Associate Dean for Research
Fine Arts

Robert Shay. Dean

(lhristine llarice. Associate Dean

for Research

Human Environmental Sciences
Retia \X'alker. Dean

Claudia l’eckilleath. Associate Dean

l'or Research

Law

Allan \‘t' \ estal. Dean

Medicine

Emery A \\'il.son. Dean

Daytd \Vatt. Senior Associate Dean
Nursing

(Jarolyn A Williams. Dean

Lynne llall. Associate Dean for Research
Pharmacy

Kenneth B. Roberts. Dean

Robert lilouin. Associate Dean for Research
Social Work

Kay Hoffman. Dean

Martin Tracy. Associate Dean for Research

The cover features

various stages of the
auto—calibration
program developed at
UK to blend the output
of several projectors
into one seamless,
high-resolution image.
Calibration begins
with a series of dots
that deﬁne the area
of the image each
projector is contribut—
ing and ends with a
grid pattern that
reﬂects the blended
image. For more

on this and related
computer science
research see “The

Metaverse” on page 4.

ODYSSEY

Director

Editor

Associate Editor
and Web Designer

Designer
Photographer
Printer

The M tgazine of [my ersity of Kentucky Reseaich

ODYSSEY

FALL 2001

F E A T U R E

LEE T. TODD JR: UK’S 11TH PRESIDENT

THE METAVERSE:
PROJECTING US INTO THE FUTURE

THE LATIN DR. SEUSS IS ON THE LOOSE

WHEREIS KENTUCKY
AGRICULTURE HEADING?

LIVING WITH DIABETES:
UK RESEARCH OFFERS NEW HOPE

RE-EMPOWERING THE PEOPLE

NEW UK CENTER MAKING
A SPLASH IN ALUMINUM R&D

>——K
OC

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Published tmce a year by the Office ol the Vice President for Research. ODYSSEY seeks to
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'l'o receiye a free subscription. contact, odysseyfllukyedu or 1 K Research (Tommuntcaucins
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Deborah \\ eis

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JIM GRIFFIOEN IS THE DIRECTOR OF THE
FOR ADVANCED NETWORKING.

ODYSSEY

U K LABORATORY

1‘\1\ 11118111 ()F KI‘INI‘I'CKY

“Say, today’s newspaper is being
projected on the surface of my desk.
Ifi make the motion of turning a page,

I should see the image change, just as if

years away and no space to start the projection research he was interested

' ’5 in, he enlisted the hel of oe Fink, director ofASTeCC, the Advanced

l were turnmg the page Of an aCtuaI paper' Science and Technolggy éommercialization Center. Fink arranged for

. Jaynes to use a third—floor office in the ASTeCC building.
—ChrISl‘Opher Jaynes “80 Steve and 1 mount two projectors on the wall ofthis little office.
We sit down, and the shadow—removal project was born because the room
is so tiny that no matter where he sits Steve‘s head is blocking the
projector,” Jaynes recalls. “And Steve says, ‘We should know

‘3 where my shadow is on the wall and correct for it with the

j 1“, second projector.’ It was a great idea.

,3 7 “By providing us space, Joe helped kick—start this
research,” Jaynes says. “Without his help we wouldn‘t
have had displays ready for opening day ofthe Hardymon
Building last September.”

The idea behind the project was to exploit projector
overlap. “When you have double or triple illumination
(every point illuminated by multiple projectors), you

can remove a shadow because the camera detects when a
projector is blocked and the computer makes the other
projectors kick—in more light," says Seales. The com—
puter creates a mask, which deﬁnes the area ofthe image
that is being obscured, and tells the other projectors to
blast in those missing pixels to complete the image.
The technical paper on shadow removal, authored by
Jaynes, Webb, Scales, and Michael Brown, one ofSeales‘s
PhD. students, will be published as part of the lEEE
(Institute ofElectrical and Electronics Engineers) Visual—
ization 2001 conference in San Diego this fall.

“My research philosophy has always been: approach
things theoretically, understand the mathematics, and solve
the problem. But then there‘s always an extra step‘ﬁgure
out how you can make it work in hardware for low cost,“

Jaynes says. “Our shadow—removal tool runs in hardware

at a rate of30 frames per second—you can wave your arm
and it automatically corrects. And it runs on hardware that
anyone can afford; in fact, your home PC will probably run
it.

Provided you are running Linux. An alternative to Win—
dows or Mac created by University of Helsinki student
Linus Torvalds in 1991, Linux is an operating system popu-
lar among computer scientists because it is “open source."
“That means 1 can go into the operating system, look at the source
w a» code, and change it to make it behave how I need it to behave,” Jaynes
says. “And when you‘re talking about research, no one is doing the same
things we are, so we have to be able to tweak the operating system.’3

BRENT SEALES AND HIS RESEARCH
TEAM ARE USING DIGITAL TECHNIQUES
TO PRESERVE A SET OF FIRE-DAMAGED,
1 'ITH-CENTURY MANUSCRIPTS.

8 ODYSSEY

Serious Play

Writing the algorithms to run the
Metaverse involves some serious math
smarts. “Computer vision‘s a total mixed
bag. There are very theoretical compo—
nents, there's deep mathematics, and you
have to be able to do those two things plus
write really good code to make the stuff
work in the end. ltsomeone comes to me
and they know a little bit about linear
algebra, I say they can usually pick up the
projective geometry stuff. People say my
lab is too hard and some students avoid
me,“ jaynes says, smiling. “But I have out—
standing students right now.

“Our students recently set up a four—
projector display, 11 by 1 1 feet, and they’re
running Quake [a popular arena combat
game] on top ofour software that blends it
all together into one huge image,“ jaynes
says. “What‘s good about that is it proves
our system actually works with out—of—the—
box software.“

Michael Brown implemented the Quake
system. “This combination ofselt‘ocontigu—
ration and OpenGL [a graphics language]
portability is one of the major themes in
Michael‘s thesis work,” says Seales. Brown
earned his PhD. from UK in july and
accepted an assistant professorship at the
HongKongUniversityofScienceandTech—
nology.

The “synchronized rendering algo—
rithm’V—the mathematical magic behind
transforming the output of several projec-
tors into a seamless image—works in a
pretty simple way, as jaynes explains.

“Each projector says, ‘It’s my turn to
draw the picture. I’m ready to draw it.’
They send that message over the network,
and when every projector is ready, the server
says, ‘Draw.’ Just last week my students got
about 10 e-mails asking to download our
algorithm for Linux. These are probably
just kids that want to do the Quake thing,
but word is starting to leak out.”

ODYSSEY

display of digital collections

for digital libraries and museums

UK recently received three signiﬁcant grants from the National Science
Foundation to support the next generation of the Metaverse.

- $1.27 million grant to fund infrastructure development and research into
techniques to support three physically separate, networked visualization
laboratories and two new technical staff

. $1 million grant partners UK, the University of Puerto Rico and Museo de
Arte de Puerto Rico to fund research into acquisition, representation and

' $375,000 grant to fund further research into conﬁgurable display systems

Jaynes is pursuing intellectual property
protection, which may ultimately lead to
patents, for a number of ideas, including
shadow removal, auto—keystoning, and auto—
calibration.

Ifyou tilt a projector up, the sides otthe
image are no longer parallel and form a
shape that resembles a keystone in an arch.
Matt Steel, a PhD. student working with
Jaynes, is writing algorithms to automati—
cally fix this problem, even as you reposi—
tion the projector. “The university could
benefit by patenting these ideas for use in
the home-theater market,“ Jaynes says. “I
think eventually we‘re going to have a pro-
jector company in here wanting to make a
new product, a projector with a built-in
camera. You set it on a table, hit a button,
and it starts to monitor things like shadows
and changes in lighting.“

As projector size and price decrease, Seales
says he envisions projectors as next-genera—
tion track lighting. “1 think people are
going to pepper rooms with projeCtors just
like normal lighting, only it will be lighting
that‘s completely controllable by computer,”
he says. But before that happens, this tech‘
nology will most likely eliminate the tradi'
tional desktop monitor. Seales and Jaynes
are already using projectors instead ofmoni-
tors in their ofﬁces. They can project their
“screen“ on any wall at much higher resolu—
tions than most monitors, freeing—up desk—
top space, and with a wireless keyboard and
mouse, they’re not constrained by cords.

On a larger scale, Seales envisions librar—
ies setting aside a room where users can view
digital collections through the Metaverse.
“Imagine ifyou went to an art museum and
you had to look at each piece ofart through
a tvvo—inch hole,“ Seales says. “Essentially
that’s what the digital library is now—what
you see is limited by the size and resolution
of the monitor. We want each library to
have an immersive archive room where you
can see the artifact at high—resolution. These
rooms would be networked so that you’ll be
able to see collections from other libraries at
the same time as you look at local collec‘
tions.“

One of Seales’s current projects involves
digitallycapturingasetofmanuscripts writ—
ten by an ll‘h-century monk on the lives of
the saints, part of the British Library's
Cottonian Collection which was damaged
by ﬁre in the 18‘h century. (This work is part
ofthe Digital Atheneum project at UK and
supported by NSF.) “Dr. Kevin Kiernan
[UK English professor] provides the schol—
arship for the humanities side ofthe project,
while my team and I provide the technical
innovation,“ Scales says. “Because of the
damage, these documents are inaccessible
to scholars, unless they travel to the British
Library. Once we work on ways to digitize
the manuscripts, the Metaverse would al—
low scholars all over the world to explore
these works.”

continued on page I]

INIVERSITY OF KENTI'CKY 9

University of Puerto Rico Students
Spend Summer in Lexington

“It’s so quiet here.” That seemed to be the consensus of the
University of Puerto Rico (UPR) students who spent eight weeks
at UK this summer. And compared with their capital city SanJuan,
with a population of 1.6 million, Lexington, Kentucky, would
seem pretty tranquil. But against this backdrop of relative quiet,
computer science majors Jesus Cabén, Maria Merghal and Jose
Ortiz Ubarri managed to squeeze a lot of cutting—edge research into
two months’ time at the Laboratory for Advanced Networking.

The UK—UPR connection goes back to 1998 when eight l’uerto
Rican students came to Lexington for a summer research program.
This year 10 students
from UPRcame to UK,
five in computer science
and five in toxicology
and biomedical sci-
ences. UPR has 70,000
undergraduate students
on 11 campuses, in—
cluding the High—Per-
formance Computing
Facility and medical
center, and has some
unique resources such
as a primate center and
tropical forestry insti—
tute.

Ashley Netherton,
the first UK student to
travel to UPR, is cur—
rently gathering data for
her master’s work in
tropical reforestation at
a geostation in the only
tropical rain forest in
North America. A number of UK faculty have spent sabbaticals in
Puerto Rico and have taught short—courses there, including Brent
Seales and Christopher Jaynes. In fact, that’s how they met these
students.

Scales taught the three students during his short course, “Intro—
duction to Image Processing,” at UPR last January. “Jesus, Maria
andJose’ are really bright,” Seales says. “I saw the students who were
really motivated and then had some inﬂuence in encouraging them
to come up.”

Caban, who worked closely with Seales during his time at UK,
concentrated on the fundamental set-up of the Metaverse. “I
focused on a project that distributes the rendering [drawing] of the
graphics between any number of machines,” Jesus says. He spent

SUMMER.

‘W‘

UNIVERSITY OF PUERTO RICO COMPUTER SCIENCE STUDENTS (LEFT TO
RIGHT) JOSE ORTIZ UBARRI, JESUS CABAN, LUIS VELEZ MATEO, MARIA
MERGHAL, AND NATHANIEL GONZALEZ SPENT Two MONTHS AT UK THIs

time writing programs to do things like calibrate projectors for
the Linux operating system, based on programs UK students
had originally written for Windows NT. Caban works at the
High-Performance Computing Facility in San Juan, which
serves researchers all across Puerto Rico, and interned at Silicon
Graphics in Orlando, Florida, last summer.

Caban and Seales spent several days in July setting up the first
Metaverse node in Puerto Rico at the computing facility.
“Getting Jesus involved is a major coup because he’ll have a
whole year to give us weekly reports on how it’s going, and as
we have new tech—
nology to deploy,
he can help set it
up,” Seales says.
uConveniently,
Jesus’s brother
William Caban is
in charge of set—
ting up lnternetZ
atthecenter,sowe
have an ‘in’ as far
as getting the net—
work bandwidth
we want as soon as
possible.“

There will be
two Metaverse
nodes in Puerto
Rico, one in the
computing facility
and one in the li—
brary. “They’ll
have a local—area
network to con—
nect the two sites, just like we’ll have at UK, and then we’ll have
the wide-area connection so students in Puerto Rico could
watch Jim McDonough teach from our mechanical engineer—
ing building,” Seales says. Jaynes plans to take his UK students
to Puerto Rico in December to set up the node in the library.

Merghal took Jaynes’s one—week seminar in Puerto Rico on
OpenGL, and says that’s why she came to UK.

“OpenGL is a graphics programming language that is ca—
pable of exploiting the accelerated graphics hardware in most
PCs today,” Jaynes says. Merghal used this language to make an
interactive 3—D model of the James F. Hardymon Building.

“OpenGL is the most basic way of creating graphics; there’s
no Visual interface where you click with the mouse. It’s just code

01) YSSEY

'c‘

that makes points and vertices," she
says. Before she came to UK,
Merghal was working on a 3—D
model of the bell tower in San Juan.
“We were experimenting with that,
and we plan to move on to other
historic monuments and buildings
in Puerto Rico.”

Ubarri, who also works at UPR’s
High Performance Computing Fa—
cility, conducted research underJim
Griffioen’s direction. “I worked on
the Digital Atheneum project,
which has a goal of enabling literary
scholars to recover the content of
old documents through image pro—
cessing,” says Ubarri, who after
g